There Will Come Soft Rains

by

Ray Bradbury

There Will Come Soft Rains: Personification 3 key examples

Definition of Personification
Personification is a type of figurative language in which non-human things are described as having human attributes, as in the sentence, "The rain poured down on the wedding guests, indifferent... read full definition
Personification is a type of figurative language in which non-human things are described as having human attributes, as in the sentence, "The rain poured down... read full definition
Personification is a type of figurative language in which non-human things are described as having human attributes, as in the... read full definition
Personification
Explanation and Analysis—Fire:

If the McClellans’ house is the story’s main character, then fire is its central antagonist. After a falling tree bough crashes through the window and sends cleaning solvent over the stove, the kitchen immediately catches flame. The night fire is untamed and uncontrollable—it tears through the house despite the technological devices’ most desperate attempts to contain it.

Earlier mentions of fire establish a close association with death and rebirth. Shortly before dying, the McClellans’ dog runs in circles with “eyes turned to fire.” In Teasdale’s poem, where a verse foretells a time when “robins will wear their feathery fire,” flames meanwhile speak to a defiant capacity for regrowth. Fire bears the suggestion of both life and its absence, foreshadowing the flames to come that night.

In its larger, full-blown form, the fire at the McClellans’ house embodies this paradox of life and death. It is, by all accounts, a destructive force: the flames make quick work of the squeaking mice and hardly diminish under the mechanical rain. Unlike the McClellans’ dog, it successfully shrugs off all of the technology’s attempts at order.

The story portrays the fire as something that is as creative as it may be violent. In its most ironic sense, this act of destruction becomes a source of life. The fire wreaks havoc on the house but also comes closest to attaining life’s full organic force. “Now the fire lay in beds, stood in the windows, changed the colors of drapes!” the narrator exclaims, using personification to deepen the sense of fire as a thing with agency. The flames feed upon the Picassos and even the closet’s clothes as they retreat from the repellent. There is even a sense of playfulness as it outmaneuvers the repellant and sends its flames crackling up through the windows. Fire becomes the only actual inhabitant in this empty house, however short-lived its stay may be.

Personification
Explanation and Analysis—Cleaning Mice:

“There Will Come Soft Rains” often trades in personification to create the impression of life. Clocks sing the time, kitchen stoves sigh, and the house quivers at the touch of sparrows. Of the many personified appliances in the McClellans' house, the cleaning mice receive the most attention:

The rooms were acrawl with the small cleaning animals, all rubber and metal. They thudded against chairs, whirling their mustached runners, kneading the rug nap, sucking gently at hidden dust.

In this flurry of action, the mice participate in the house’s upkeep. The quasi-human actions—“thudded,” “whirling,” “kneading,” “sucking”—add a life-like quality to the cleaning robots, as though erasing the boundaries between organic life and artificial machines. The line where “metal” ends and life begins may be fainter than humans have imagined it to be. Strung together, these verbs emphasize the scale of the activity and sustain the appearance of life amid conditions so apparently inhospitable to it. The mice are so abundant that they even take on a parasitically proliferative quality: the rooms are “acrawl” with their movement. Through personification, this moment challenges the distinctions between machine and nature. The mice also represent an alternative to the anthropocentric arrogance of human civilization: the McClellans may have died, but their technology continues to live on.

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Explanation and Analysis—Elephants and Snakes:

The story features an instance of simile, metaphor, and personification in describing the house’s combat with the fire. As the fire sweeps across the kitchen, the ranks of vacuum mice scuttle out to contain the flames and the attic trapdoors deploy a “gushing green chemical”:

The fire backed off, as even an elephant must at the sight of a dead snake. Now there were twenty snakes whipping over the floor, killing the fire with a clear cold venom of green froth.

In the first of these sentences, a simile links the fire’s movements to that of a frightened “elephant” recoiling before a snake. This is followed immediately by a metaphor that develops the comparison, identifying the “repellant” as the “snake.” Importantly, this transition from simile to metaphor intensifies the degree of comparison. The green chemicals don’t merely resemble “snakes”—at this point, they have become them. What had been understood to be the “dead snake” just one sentence before is now “whipping over the floor” and spewing “cold venom.” The repellant becomes more lifelike through the metaphor’s tightened association.

In doing so, this elaborate act of comparison invests the fire and repellant with an unlikely dynamism. Both the fire and its adversary are moving, attacking, and defending themselves. Their animalistic intensity creates a sense of vitality that is absent anywhere else. In a town of ruined houses buried beneath charcoal ash, they seem to be more lifelike and vivid than all of humanity’s own doomed creations.

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